Saturday, June 27, 2015

(The Rev. Know-it-all is making a trek to the north woods. In his place a pastor addresses a local situation.)

Friends,

I have
been asked if we are going to share the parking lot with our new neighbors, the
Al Suffah mosque. No, we are not. The
Episcopalian church at 8201 Karlov Avenue had been for sale for quite a while.
One morning, I saw someone taking down the for sale sign. I asked the fellow
taking down the sign to whom the building had been sold. He said that he really
would rather not say.

I
said,” Oh, you sold it to Muslims.”

He
said again, “I really can’t say.”

I then
said, “I’m the pastor across the street.”

He
brightened and said, “Oh, then I can tell you. Yes, we sold it to Muslims and
I’ve wanted to talk to you about letting them use your parking lot.”

I said,
“That will never happen.”

Suffah
Educational Guidance (School) and Masjid (Mosque) was formerly located in a
rental property on Devon Ave. in Chicago. It is not originally a local congregation.
Why would they purchase a facility that had no parking? I can only surmise that
they assumed, or were told, that they would be able to use the large parking
lot at St. Lambert’s. I was never consulted about the situation; it seems the
whole transaction was rather secret.

I
suspect that the realtor assured the buyers that they would be able to use the
parking lot. I also suspect that the Muslim community had no idea that the
people who had sold them the church were a different group than the members of
St. Lambert’s. They told members of our staff that they had good relations with
the diocese. They were surprised to learn that the Episcopal diocese is not the
same as the Catholic archdiocese. If the building was sold as including
parking, or even hinting that a deal had been made with St. Lambert’s that
would seem to me to be fraud. It makes no sense that a congregation based in
Chicago would purchase a facility here without parking included.

Parishioners,
staff and neighbors have been approached by members of the mosque to ask about
the parking lot. I had a brief e-mail correspondence with a member of the
masjid staff, in which I said that I would be interested in dialogue, but
collaboration was not possible unless I could agree with the aims of the school
and mosque. I have managed a lot of parking lots in my life as a priest. I have
actually had to go to parking lots to arbitrate fights and direct traffic while
still wearing vestments.

When a parking lot is open to shared use, it
becomes the property of no one, and all feel they have rights to it, but have
no responsibilities for it. To allow someone the use of the parking lot is to
take on a legal liability and an insurance liability. Even if disclaimers are
posted and waivers are signed, a decent lawyer can overturn them and drag
things out in court for months. No one has permission to use St. Lambert’s
parking lot, except on church business. Two large congregations simply cannot
share the same space. Even if someone says, it will only be occasionally, it
will inevitably become the mosque’s regular parking lot. We need to know
exactly who is in our lot and why. When neighbors stake out territory and there
are a 5 or 10 extra cars in the lot regularly, we find that odd things start
happening. Drug dealers start meeting in the lot because among all those cars
they have some anonymity.

I
remember at another parish having to regularly clean up used condoms and
syringes from the lot. No one worried about a few extra cars, no one except me.
This was starting to happen here at St. Lambert’s, but because we were on it
right away it stopped. For the good of the neighborhood, I refuse to lose
control of the lot.These are the
practical reasons for my decision.There
are other reasons that, for me, are perhaps more important.

Suffah is an interesting
word.In the far end of the mosque in Medina
there was a suffah, a raised platform for sitting or reclining at the north end
of the mosque. This is where Muhammad and his companions met as exiles from
Mecca.

The
English word sofa is derived from suffah.
So in effect the name of our new neighbors is “Masjid e Suffah,” means the
mosque of the sofa, and perhaps implies that its members are the close
companions of Muhammad in a new and strange land.The new mosque on Karlov is more than a
mosque. It’s a “hifz” school. Urdu is
the common language of Pakistan and a number of northern Indian states. Hifz is the Urdu word for rote
memorization.From the literature I
could find on the web the purpose of the school includes introducing young
people to Muslim tradition, to train young Muslims in the memorization of Quran
and in the implementation of its principles. Frankly, there are some Islamic
principles that I find questionable.

I have
a hard time with the Quranic injunctions regarding women. For instance,
regarding inheritance: (Qur'an 4:11)
"The male shall have the equal of the portion of two females."Regarding divorce: “And due to the wives is
similar to what is expected of them, according to what is reasonable. But the
men have a degree over them.” (Qur'an 2:228)
regarding legal testimony (Qur'an 2:282)
"And call to witness, from among your men, two witnesses. And if two men
be not found then a man and two women.”The veiling of women seems to be demanded by Quran 33 59 “O Prophet! Tell to your wives,
and daughters and Muslim women, that they should keep putting a part of their
wrapping covers over their faces.”The
most startling is An-Nisa 4:34 “Men are the
protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has made one of them to
excel the other, and because they spend from their means. Therefore the
righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in the husband's absence what
Allah orders them to guard. As to those women on whose part you see
ill-conduct, admonish them, refuse to share their beds, beat them but if they
return to obedience, seek not against them means. Surely, Allah is Ever Most
High, Most Great.”

Modern
Muslim apologists say that the context of the verb “daraba” is shun or advise, but in his farewell sermon Muhammad
would seem to indicate otherwise. “Allah permits you to shut them in separate
rooms and to beat them, but not severely. If they abstain from [evil], they
have the right to their food and clothing in accordance with the custom. Treat
women well, for they are [like] domestic animals with you and do not possess
anything for themselves”.

Beyond the Quran, in the sayings of Muhammad
we read, “Umar ibn al-Khattab told that the Prophet (peace be upon him) said,
‘A man will not be asked as to why he beat his wife.” (Sunan
Abu Dawoud 11:2142)

If you
think I am making this up, or exaggerating it, look it up for yourself. Do a
web search for “How to beat your wife, YouTube”. I dare you to do it. You will
find videos discussing the virtue of moderate wife beating. If you think I am
impolite or intolerant to mention this, you are a fool. Your wanting it not to
be true changes nothing. I cannot in good conscience help a school where young
men will be taught that under, certain circumstances, women should be beaten. I
just can’t do it.

Two
more verses in the Quran trouble me. Surah 3:28
teaches, “Let not the believers take the unbelievers for friends rather than
believers…but you should guard yourselves against them, guarding
carefully.”In Islamic law the doctrine
of kitman (secrecy or, concealment) is part of ‘iyal, the art of deception. To
make ambiguous statements, to pay lip-service to authority is perfectly
acceptable in Islam. One is even expected to conceal one's religion when it is
to the advantage of Islam or when the individual Muslim facing persecution.
This is called “taqiyya.” No Muslim owes an
infidel the truth when it comes to matters religious.

If you
have a Muslim friend, he is either not a very good Muslim or not a very good
friend. Close friendship with non-Muslims is forbidden. No matter how polite or
friendly, a good Muslim should not let a non-Muslim into his deepest
confidence.

"Then,
when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them,
and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush.
But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their
way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful" Quran
9:5

It is
the goal of the orthodox Muslim to enforce Islamic law, sharia, on the entire
world. Under Islamic law, we Christians, Jews and one or two other religions
may practice our religion privately, provided we pay a special tax. When we pay
the tax we must be made to feel that we are subjects. We are to be humiliated.
Atheists, Hindus, Wiccans, Shintoist, Daoist, practitioners of any folk
religion or nature worship, anyone who is not in a “religion of the book” must convert
to Islam or be killed.

One
more verse, "Bedizen not yourselves with the bedizenment of the Time of
Ignorance.” 33.33 (al-Ahzab) There are
only two eras in Islam, the time of Islam and the time of darkness. Muslims
have a reputation for scientific advancement in the middle ages. The case can
be made that many of the Muslim advances in art, architecture and science were
the product of the conquered Non-Muslim people among them. Whether or not that
is fact the door to science slammed shut around the year 1100 when the Islamic
jurist Muhammad al-Ghazali rejected Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and other Greek
thinkers because they were infidels. He taught that natural law is a restraint
on Allah, and thus could not exist.All
things are caused by the sovereign will of Allah, and thus are not the result
of natural processes.

Most
of the Islamic world accepted al-Ghazali’s teachings and his view that the
sciences are pointless and even unlawful. In Islamic law all forms of human art
are discouraged except calligraphy and the use of Quran verses as
ornamentation. Wahhabism, the strict form of Islam practice in Saudi Arabia,
and the inspiration for the current Islamic movements advocates a return to the
primitive life of seventh century Arabia, and absolute Sharia. There is nothing
worthwhile beyond Quran and the will of Allah, and thus art and science and the
use of reason are pointless. Music is discouraged as well as non-Quranic study
except for the sake of the advancement of Islam. My entire culture should be
dissolved. Goodbye to Mozart, Michelangelo, the great Buddhas of Bamiyam, and
the treasures of the Louvre. Even grape vines must be uprooted by the true
believer because wine is evil. (Qur'an 5:90)
Goodbye to the Napa valley, Au revoir
to the vineyards of Bordeaux.

I will
not cooperate with an institution that by teaching Quran, if I understand
correctly, hopes to teach young men to limit the freedom of women and to beat
them on occasion, holds that under certain circumstance it is proper to deceive
me, that wants to take away my freedoms as an American citizen and to subject
me to its legal code or kill me, and wants to eradicate my culture and my way
of life and my religion.

Added
to all this, we are a congregation that includes Arab, Assyrian and Chaldean
Christians who have fled Islamic initiated violence. We are a congregation
whose members are Africans, Filipinos, and people from Sri Lanka and India all
of whose countries of origin are suffering or have suffered conflict with
Muslims. Why would I want to help a school that teaches anyone to memorize
Quran and to use it as a guide for their lives?

Friday, June 19, 2015

You forgot to explain the
final doxology of the Our Father, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and
the glory, for ever and ever. Amen” How is that dangerous?

Yours ever,

Dr. Reinhold Saulogey PhD.
DDT. FYI.

(Most people just call me
“Doc”)

Dear “Doc” Saulogey,

The doxology at the end of
the Our Father is not dangerous because it isn’t part of the original prayer.
It isn’t found in Luke's version of the Our Father, and it isn’t found in the
earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew. Remember that at the time of
Christ and in the subsequent centuries there were no Xerox machines, not even
faxes! Things were written out by hand by underfed, freezing monks who spent
their lives copying out books by hand. They might take a break and go to
vespers then to the refectory for a hearty bowl of gruel and the pint of wine
that St. Benedict allowed in his monastic rule and then return to the
scriptorium to do a little more copying work before night prayer and a five-hour
sleep on a pallet of straw on the unheated dirt or stone floor of their cozy
cells. Then it was up for the service of readings at 2 or 3 AM and then off to
another day of copying.Sometimes monks
made a mistake, or added something that wasn’t there, or put something in the
wrong place in the text.

If Duke Squiselbert or some
such wealthy medieval nobleman commissioned 10 or 20 copies of the Bible to
give as nice St. Swiven’s Day presents to people he wanted to impress with his
piety, and those copies had a mistake in them, such instead of “To wit, Libyans
and troglodytes.” (2 Chronicles 12:13) some exhausted monk, woozy with oil lamp
fumes, wrote, “To wit Libyans and hermaphrodites” then the wrong word appeared
in 20 copies. When those 20 copies were again copied, the text was discussing
hermaphrodites instead of troglodytes. Meanwhile, another monk who had gotten a
little more sleep but had been commissioned to write only one copy of the text,
properly wrote, “To wit, Libyans and troglodytes.”

The majority text, with its
interest in hermaphrodites, became accepted as the authentic version. Then many
years later, in for instance the wacky 20th century, when people hadn’t the
sense that God gave geese, scholars might point out that the scripture condoned
sex change operations using the reference to hermaphrodites in 2 Chronicles
12:13, as a proof text. Their whole theology would have been based on the error
of a drowsy monk in a dark medieval scriptorium. Herein lays the problem with sola scriptura, (Bible only) theology.
The common text is not always the right text.

There is a whole science
called papyrology in which very smart, very squirrely professors try to figure
these things out. They don’t get out much, but at least it’s a living. So, the
simple answer is that, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory”
appears in a lot of later manuscripts, but not in the earlier manuscripts. It
appears in a similar wording (“for yours is the power and the glory forever”),
as a conclusion for the Our Father in the Didache, 8:2, a late 1st century or
early 2nd century text written in Syria. It was probably used in the liturgy as
an addition to the prayer, and thus was ultimately included in certain
manuscripts especially in the Eastern Church. We Latins have never used it in
the Mass that is until the changes after second Vatican Council when we tried
to make nice with the Protestants but, not wishing to offend more traditional
Catholics, we didn’t add it directly to the Our Father, but threw it in a little
further on in the Mass, thus making nobody happy.

So there you have it. It’s
probably not part of the Our Father as the first Christians received it from
the Lord and prayed it, but it’s still true and not a bad thing to say. And
besides it is a little bit dangerous. Remember that we are saying “thine” not
mine.

Friday, June 12, 2015

Here is an illuminating
section from Chapter VII ofC. S. Lewis’
Screwtape Letters, (Remember that the
Screwtape Letters are a
correspondence between two devils, the senior, Uncle Screwtape, the
undersecretary for the department of temptations and the younger, his nephew,
Wormwood, a junior tempter. The book is chockfull of suggestions on how to get
your man safely into Hell, “our father’s kingdom below” as they call it.

“I wonder that you should
ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient in ignorance of your own
existence. That question, at least for the present phase of the struggle, has
been answered for us by the High Command. Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal
ourselves. Of course this has not always been so. We are really faced with a
cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the
pleasing results of direct terrorism, and we make no magicians. On the other
hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and skeptics.
At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to
emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in
effect a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the
human mind remains closed to belief in the enemy. The “Life Force,” the worship
of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis may here prove useful. If once we
can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but
veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the
existence of “spirits”—then the end of the war will be in sight. But in the
meantime we must obey our orders. I do not think you will have much difficulty
in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that “devils” are predominantly
comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion
of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of
something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that
(it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in
you.”

May I draw your attention to
a few particular lines in the above quoted passage? “We shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their
science.” Science itself is a belief system. This year’s science books will
be tomorrow’s trash. It is the nature of science to replace itself, yet people
constantly say ridiculous things like, “Science has proven….” or “Religion is
just a way to answer questions that science has not yet answered.” As far as I
can tell, the more one knows about things like physics and microbiology, the
more wondrous things become and the more questions there are to ask. Science
for most people, especially those with a light smattering of learning, is not
an inquiry but a belief system.

“The
‘Life Force,’ the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis may here
prove useful.” This is an amazing line. There seems to have
been an actual conspiracy in the 50’s and 60’s on the part of people like
Sigmund Freud’s disciple, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and the
famed anthropologist Bronsilav
Malinowksi to get young people to start thinking about matters intimate and
solitary. This would help young people to stop worrying about God, and thus
would free society from the restrictive tyranny of religion.

It worked. Now all we think
about is sex. Every other commercial on television seems to counsel us on how
to be ready when the moment is right. I blush to be any more direct. All it
seems we ever talk about now is sex and how the stranger varieties are just
fine. To say that maybe there are just some things that one should perhaps
avoid is to indulge in hate speech and to have right-thinking people storm out
on you and call you intolerant and unenlightened. We have exchanged the tyranny
of religion for the tyranny of weirdness.

Tolerance is no longer
enough. The truly good person must now joyfully endorse what in other time was
thought ghoulishly unnatural. We have the bizarre phenomenon of the president
of the United States congratulating a former Olympic athlete on his, I mean
her, or its, or something on a change in gender that has involved a bad haircut
and a lot of botched cosmetic surgery. The worship of sex and science is
strange enough, but there seems to be a fascination with the occult among
people who deny the existence of God in their ordinary lives and who certainly
deny the validity of organized religion.“If once we can produce our
perfect work — the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping,
what he vaguely calls ‘Forces’ while denying the existence of ‘spirits’—then
the end of the war will be in sight.” Lewis wrote these thing around 1940,
75 years ago. How did he know that where the 20th century was headed? One smart
fellow, if you ask me.

We worship sex and science
and treat spiritual forces as a sort of parlor game that we can find on our
smart-phones. Believe me, “The kingdom below” is no parlor game. In my line of
work I have run into the devil a few times. I have never been an exorcist, but
I have assisted in exorcisms and they are most certainly real. People think
that evil is more interesting than virtue. It is all great fun in scary movies
and ghost-hunting TV shows. Trust me. Hollywood has got it wrong. Over the
years, people have come to me insisting they are possessed because they are
hearing voices or there are things going bump in the night. 99% of those who
have come to me with these problems just have over-active imaginations.

But then there is the 1
percent. Their situation is truly horrible. When someone comes to me with a
Hollywood style demonic problem, they are usually just watching too much
television. The real sign of demonic possession isn’t so much heat as it is
cold.By this I mean that there is a
great coldness about the devil. The devil rarely convulses and levitates,
though those things actually happen. The devil is cold. There is a sudden coldness
and distance about the person possessed. From being a person who loves kittens
and butterflies, they become people who like to pull the wings off flies. They
are cold, not so much overheated.

I have seen and heard of
enough strange things to think the devil is real. It is not the strange things
that convince me that it’s real. It is that when you run into a truly possessed
person, at least in my limited experience, he is always the same as the others.
It is as if you’ve got a snarling badger trapped under the porch. The devil is
mean and colorless and humorless. There is nothing interesting about him at
all.He is a devourer, as Lewis says,
the stronger will devouring the weaker. He promises freedom but delivers
slavery. We are a generation who believes itself free. We are badly mistaken.
We are slaves to our own passions and desires. We believe that because I want
it, it must be good. God, if there is a God, would never forbid me something I
really feel or want.

Overwhelming appetite and
passion, masquerading as love, justify any number of self-destructive behaviors
and relationships. We are no freer than a fish firmly snared on a hook. The
worm may be tasty but we cannot swim away. We are ready to be gutted, breaded
and tossed in a frying pan for the devil’s delight. Hell is an eternally boring
place where we experience the darkness that we chose in this world — yes,
chose!You must choose to go to heaven,
or choose to remain in hell. The truth is that God doesn’t send anyone to hell.
He finds us there, and so sent us His only begotten Son to show us a way
out.

Think about the human
condition for a moment. Infants are complete narcissists. They live in a world
of one. If the baby wants a bottle in his mouth, or needs a change of clothes,
or simply wants mommy to hold him, he lets out that certain cry that can
penetrate brick. It matters not that you have to be up at 5 AM to go to work.
If that baby wants something the whole house is up!I know people who are 50 or 60 years old who
are content only if they have a bottle in their mouths, a change of clothes and
mommy to hold them.

Most of us never leave the
fundamental egotism and selfishness into which we are born, and I suspect that
when we leave this world the only thing that really happens is that time stops
and we are who we have decided to be. If we cling to our childish narcissism
then that’s who we will be forever.

Alone.

Eternally.

I have met a number of
people who, when they had a near-death experience, did not see a light and a
tunnel, but experienced “an outer darkness” and absolute aloneness. If, on the
other hand we admit our sinfulness and ask for the grace of repentance, if we
do our best to respond to the grace that’s given, then He will lead us to a
wedding feast, an eternal banquet of love. The choice really is ours. The devil
wants to convince us that he is the interesting one when nothing could be
farther from the truth. Hell is eternal boring sameness, a gray aloneness, lit
only the fires of love denied.

“Deliver us, O Lord, from
the evil one.”Please.

Rev. Know-it-all

PS. If you want to learn
more about the devil and how he works, don’t bother with the Discovery Channel
or anything else on TV. Get CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters and read it while
listening to it read by John Cleese of A
Fish Called Wanda and “Monty Python” fame.It’s easy to find on YouTube just do a web search for The Screwtape
Letters (Narrated by John Cleese) - YouTube

Friday, June 5, 2015

“But deliver us from
evil…”Another problem! This phrase
comes to us from the Latin translation of the Our Father. There is a
grammatical problem with Latin. Ancient Romans talked like cavemen. They had no
articles. Remember grammar from long ago and far way? Remember how your fifth
grade teacher said that someday you would need to remember your grammar
lessons? Well, that’s today.

The article is an adjective,
a determiner that precedes a noun. There are two types of articles in English:
the definite article (the) and the indefinite (a/an). The definite article
specifies a particular individual; the indefinite article indicates that the
noun following it is a member of a larger group. Got that?Essentially we are talking about “a” or
“the.” For instance, “a dog” means any old dog. “The dog” refers to that
beloved family pet whom you follow around with a plastic bag on a cold winter
morning.

In English we might say “We
need a dog!” or “Do I have to take the dog out for a walk this morning. It’s
Becky Sue’s turn.”Romans and,
presumably, cave persons did not have articles of any kind. They would say, “We
need dog” or “Do I have to take dog out for walk this morning. It’s Becky Sue’s
turn.” You see, Romans talked just like cavemen.

Greek and English both have
articles, though Greek only had a definite article. They are used in a
remarkably similar way in both languages. One of their uses is to turn an
adjective into a noun. For instance to say these three adjectives preceded by
the definite article, “the good, the bad, and the ugly’” clearly indicates “the
good person, the bad person and the ugly person,” — or it indicates a Clint
Eastwood Spaghetti Western.Forget
about the Western. Concentrate on the substantive adjective, Greek did the same
thing.

This whole harangue about
grammar is essential for understanding the final phrase of the Our Father. As I
said, we get the prayer from the Latin text which says “Deliver us from evil.”
that’s not what the prayer is really saying. In Greek it says “alla hrusia hemas apo tou ponerou”“Tou”
means “the.”Deliver us from “THE evil
(one). In other words in the final phrase of the Our Father we are admitting
that there is such a thing as the devil and we need to be freed from him.

We are in a war with unseen
powers, and I don’t mean just the Internal Revenue Service. There is an unseen
world on whose border we live. As the old Scottish prayer says,

“From ghoulies
and ghosties, and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!”

I don’t know
about ghosties and ghoulies, but there are certainly things unseen that would
devour us. “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like
a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”(1Peter 5:8)

In praying the Our Father,
we are admitting that there is such a world and if you are not of that opinion,
perhaps you should leave out this part of the Our Father next time you say it. In
the introduction to his Screwtape Letters,
C. S. Lewis says, “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race
can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other
is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves
are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with
the same delight.”

He goes on to say that we
moderns either think of them as humorous fellows with horns, a tail and wearing
a red union suit, or oppositely, something much more powerful that they really
are. And that the devil’s most clever strategy in this present age is to make
us think he does not exist. St Paul warns us clearly. “For our struggle is not
against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities,
against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil
in the heavenly realms.”(Ephesians
6:12)We disregard their existence at
our own peril, and the world is currently being devoured and no one is
noticing. The devil feasts on the blood of children. It is his favorite dish.
We are providing the feast while insisting all the while that there is no
devil.

So who are the devils and
why do they hate us? The scriptures and the teaching of the Church are fairly
silent on the point, but there are theories. The most common one goes something
like this. The celestial spirits, whom we usually call angels, are as if
infinitely more wondrous than we. They are as if all powerful; as if all
knowing; as if all seeing and eternal — that is timeless. Only God is truly
omnipotent and all-knowing, but compared to the angelic spirits we are like
insects, like worms.

The theory holds that the
Heavenly Father presented his plan to the angels, saying that for love of the
human insects, He was going to incarnate His heart, His very Son as one of them
and that He planned to elevate them even above the angels. Fully a third of the
celestial spirits, decided that if this was God’s decision, God could not be
God and so they rebelled under the leadership of the Angel of Light, called “Lucifer”
in Latin. They were cast out of heaven in a great battle led by the archangel
Michael. The book of Ecclesiasticus (2:24) says, “Nevertheless through the envy
of the devil came death into the world: and they that do hold of his side do
find it.”

The fallen angels conceived
an unending hatred for humanity, because God had shared with the humans
something he did not share even with the celestial spirits. Angels do not
reproduce. Of them Jesus said, “At the resurrection people will neither marry
nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.” (Matthew
22:30) The devil hates all forms of creativity. The ugliness of current art and
its desire to shock rather than uplift is demonic. It is interesting that so
many modern churches look more like spaceships from the planet Ugly than like
the House of God; but more than art, the devil despises children. A man and a
woman in their union can create something immortal. True, God creates the soul,
but from a woman’s body there emerges a unique new body and, if what Christ
said is true, the body is eternal, for good or for ill.

The angels do not create,
and they do not reproduce. The devil wants to end human creativity. Our
generation in the name of human freedom has ruined art and has created
narcissistic, sterile marriages. Same-sex marriage, abortion, pornography,
artificial birth control, are all forms of sterile sexuality, and that is
exactly what the devil is going for. God loves children. The devil hates them.
He likes to kill the ones that are conceived and better still, to keep them
from ever being conceived.We think we
are free. We are snared just as surely as the fly in spider’s web.

“From ghoulies and ghosties,
and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord,
deliver us!”

Rev. Know-it-all

About Me

Rev. Know-it-all is the alter ego of Fr. Richard Simon, Pastor of St. Lambert Parish, Skokie, IL.
Now a regular host of Relevant Radio's "Fr. Simon Says", Fr. Simon spent over 20 years "...teaching dead languages to comatose seminarians."
Credits: The Reverend Know-It-All is a parody of Mr. Know-It-All, the alter ego of Bullwinkle J. Moose, a carton character created by Jay Ward (1920-1989).